Holding the Shop Together: German Industrial Relations in the Postwar Era by Stephen J. Silvia (review)

Stephen Silvia’s monograph on industrial relations is a very welcome addition to the existing literature on German industrial relations, with both the novice and the expert being able to benefit from the book. The book is divided into five chapters. After a good introduction, in which he explains the intention and structure of the book, Silvia begins his investigation with a two-chapter outline of the German model of industrial relations. Chapter 1 summarizes the German tradition of state legislation in the field of industrial relations and the impact this has had on unions and employers. Here, Silvia claims with some reason that the postwar economic miracle had its roots, in part, in the industrial relations legislation of the Weimar Republic and even in the imperial period. He also challenges the claim that industrial collective bargaining is independent of the state by pointing out that, in fact, legal provisions and judicial rulings provide a set of “framework conditions” in the background (p. 4), which often goes unnoticed by trade union and employer associations’ negotiators. Chapter 2 undertakes an assessment of Germany’s perhaps most famous industrial relations provision, codetermination. This chapter is very helpful to the novice to the topic by explaining the origin and history of codetermination as well as its more recent challenges, which came in form of German unification and European Union legislation. Furthermore, the chapter explains well the role and function of works councils in the context of industrial relations.

Having prepared the ground in this way, Silvia then moves on to address the actual topic of his monograph, with the following three chapters dealing with trade unions and the employer associations. Chapter 3, titled “A Quantitative Analysis of Membership Development in the Postwar German Trade Union Movement,” is the most theoretical chapter of the book. Once again starting with a look at the historical development of postwar West German trade unions and their membership development, Silvia employs a number of tests that allow him to investigate union membership and density. For these tests, he is one of the first to use gender as a variable for the measurement of German union density. Another variable, membership in left-of-center parties, is used for the post-unification period, but not without pointing out the potential problems this method holds (p. 95). Silvia’s conclusion is that falling membership and overall union density are a result of changing working conditions, which led to an altered social milieu. It is this changed social milieu, and not globalization, that is the key factor in the decline of union membership and density, in particular after German unification. Chapter 4, the book’s longest chapter, analyzes and explains what Silvia calls Germany’s “two post-war union movements.” A qualitative study explains the change from sectoral unions, a system that had existed in West Germany for about forty years, toward one of multisectoral unions after a decade of experimentation and reforms from about the mid-1990s onward. The chapter also deals with the consequences for the unions of German unification, which initially brought a big boost in membership before turning into a financial fiasco for the Trade Union Federation ( Deutscher Gewerkschaftsbund, DGB) in the wake of rising East German unemployment after 1991, because the DGB had to pay for labor tribunal costs. Large parts of the chapter address the causes and consequences of reforms under Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s “Agenda 2010” and the almost hostile relationship, at times, between the unions and a supposedly left-of-center chancellor. The reforms not only put further pressure on the unions, but also showed the limited political influence the unions had during the first decade of the new millennium. Ultimately, they contributed to the new union strategy of mergers and multisectoralism on the one side but also...